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On the digital campus

Hello,

I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor working to further the digital campus, an important emergent transformation in higher education. By digital campus, I'm not referring to the uses of computers and the like in a physical place, the campus. I'm interested in emergent places in cyberspace, digital campuses, where people engage in the full range of activities characteristic of higher education. If the campus situates the life and work of alma mater, she increasingly does so in two forms, the material bricks and morter of the campus old-style, and the digital packets interacting through the campus new style.

You minght ask why I distinguish between a new and an old campus. The buildings and grounds aren't going away and much information technology has a home there. Why don't I just study it's uses there without introducing something new, the digital campus? Simplistically, it's because I'm old, born in 1939, and I can't just hang around to see how things work out. Furthermore, who can? Emergent changes work slowly, and none of us will be around to witness their fulfillment. In the meantime, it's a part of wisdom to inform our choices by anticipating, not predicting, the developing possibilities, something I hope in current work to do.

Which brings me to the business at hand: not to tell all that I think about the digital campus, but to say a bit about my intellectual life leading up to now so that you might judge what I might say on it will be worthy of your attention.

Born in New York New York, a child of depression yuppies — dad, investment banking, & mom, dress design, to the age of 3 I was as a minor prince in Gramercy Park. I was then moved, to my delight, to a small farm in eastern Pennsylvania, where I enjoyed a Rousseauian childhood, looslely overseen while my parents commuted to their work. At 8, I began to shuffle between country and city beginning my formal education in elite schools — Buckley, Deerfield, Princeton (BA '61), and Columbia (PhD '68).

Perceiving dispersed parts of it, we form many partial views, diffusing its importance and novelty. Let's seek clarity about what the digital campus does, how it works, who it serves, where it flourishes, and why it is important.

To begin, consider place. A place interests us because it situates human experience, because of what happens, what takes place there. Place enables living interaction.

At the fringe, there are exceptions, but it is fair to say that each college and university, and other educational institutions, has a campus, a physical place, buildings and grounds, which situates each institution and the people and activities that constitute it in space and time. Each particular campus differs from all the others, but they have common features and uses. If we have studied or worked at one campus, we will understand a good deal about how any one of the other ones function.

Physical arrangements enabling academic life to take place took elemental form in medevil cities 6 centuries ago, continuously developing since then.